


everything dies now baby that's a fact (but maybe everything that dies someday comes back)

by Missy



Category: Ash vs Evil Dead, Evil Dead - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Growing Old, Humor, Pre-Canon, Pre-Series, Speculation, Spoilers, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 12:01:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4391099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You grow older.  </p><p>That doesn't necessarily mean you grow smarter.</p><p>[pre-series speculative fic]</p>
            </blockquote>





	everything dies now baby that's a fact (but maybe everything that dies someday comes back)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is littered with spoilers grabbed from various sources and is as close to canon compliant as possible.

The first thing you do is go to find the book.

Like that will happen. You’re filled with doubt when you get to the pine barren you’d abandoned, but there it is – caught in a tree branch, high over the remains of the cabin. You skin your palms climbing up to get it, then you tuck it under your work shirt, into the belt of your pants.

Logic isn’t really factoring into your decision makings. You know you need to split before people start asking questions.

You see the Airstream for sale, half-price, in a lot downtown. You’re not going back to the apartment and its memories of Linda any time soon, so you shrug and empty your savings account. 

You always did want to see America.

 

***

 

You have your guard up at first. They might come back at any minute, and so you build traps, keep the saw and the gun in working order, spend days crafting defenses, fortifying your own security. Every scenario possible plays out in your mind, a wayward tape recording looping nightmarish messages. Everything must be cloaked under a curtain of normalcy, and so everything is. 

You come home when the heat dies down. You find a place to park and a lot you can afford, and a store that needs your price gun skills.

After a week it feels like you’d never left.

 

*** 

 

The future descends over you like a blanket, turning the present and future into a long, warm pitch-colored road. 

You slow down. Your teeth start to go, north and south, but they’re replaceable. Your hairline recedes and then you have to start dying it jet black, but you pull it off. That’s just part of your charm – the indefensible, magnetic charm you’ve always had.

Though even that’s starting to dim. 

You get lazier and lazier. The exercise equipment out in the yard starts to rust through, and you spend the afternoon making yourself a girdle because you’re too embarrassed to admit you’ve got a spare tire.

Most days it doesn’t hurt like it used to. You make jokes about exercise to the kids you work with. They roll their eyes and tell you aisle 5 is running out of Susie Sunshine Wake And Bake Ovens. 

You don’t really forget. 

Your nightmares won’t let you. 

But you can survive this way.

 

**** 

 

You come and they leave. 

At least that’s a constant.

 

***

 

Eli’s the one who finds you on one sunny morning, lying on the pavement on your way to work, the tip of his tail scarred by a passing tire.

Why do you pick him up? You don’t know. He just looks so small and vulnerable, and the tar feels hot on your calloused fingertips as you scoop him. He doesn’t resist your touch. You form your morning around his wants. 

The amount of money you spend on him is ungodly. Two hundred on a vet visit; a couple of hundred on crickets and mealworms, a tank and a sunlamp and rocks and sand and a shitload of things the kid in the pet aisle says you need.

But need is just what drives you. He needs you, and you need him, and it’s nice to have something to look out for. 

 

*** 

 

You’re fifty-seven and you buy yourself a double chocolate Pepperidge Farm cake and jam a candle in the center (a number one, because you’re the boss). You eat it by yourself, then go to a strip club and buy yourself a midnight lap dance from a disinterested redhead. 

You don’t get laid, but it doesn’t matter.

_You’re alive._

 

***

 

You didn’t mean to do it.

Of course. 

 

*** 

As you reattach the trailer door, you whistle to yourself. 

It’s been a hell of a night and you can feel them staring at you, eyes boring into the back of your head. You still don’t know what to say. You keep it light.

You flirt with the girl when you really feel sorry for her, and talk to the kid like he’s an equal because you’re lonely. You’re exhausted but alive, and you’re bound together by this open secret, stuck like glue to the wheel. They treat you like you know what you’re doing, and you feel like maybe you do. For once. Basically.

You dust off your pants and give them buckets of sudsy water, telling them that it’s their turn to do some work. The boy stares at you like you’re made out of moonlight, and the girl rolls her eyes and calls you an asshole under her breath.

Outside the car is still humming. 

All right. You have a full tank of gas, and probably a way out of this if you think hard enough.

Let’s go.

*** 

Well, that was a disaster. At least you made it out alive –Kelly’s down some parents, but it couldn’t be helped. It’s another lesson for her about loss, but what could you have done? You know the truth – that awhile all of these departures mount up in your head and gut and you have to learn to swallow them down and smile. It’s new for her, but she’ll figure it out by herself. 

You try to be a gentleman about it, but she doesn't buy your line. Instead she rolls her eyes and walks away. 

Then it’s morning, and the kids are sleeping back in the trailer, curled up like a couple of puppies on your sofa (which you didn’t tell them they could use but whatever). You’re way too wired to do the same, so you make some instant coffee, take Eli out of his cage and perch on the front step, letting yourself cool down and take a break.

Eventually you turn up the radio.

There you sit, with Springsteen wailing from stereo about joining the mob in Atlantic City, watching the clouds move. The silence is so perfect, so beautiful. Why didn’t you treasure it when you had oceans of it to play with, thirty years of unbroken holiness?

You close your eyes. Your dentures scrape your gums and you feel the wind blow through what’s left of your hair. It’s easy to go back now, with the grit of blood and bone in your nail bed, to go back to when you were young and made an entire kingdom tremble under your hand. 

You _can_ go back to that time, in spirit if not in body. They can take you there, with a look or a clinging arm. But right now you need nothing. The infinite bright of the morning looks eternal, extending everywhere – all the way down to hell and all the way up to heaven.

It’s like fate, or wisdom, or poetry – some kind of bullshit like that. 

*** 

You dare, after a little while, to think of a name. To conjure up a head of red hair. 

To think to yourself that maybe Linda would be proud of you after all.


End file.
